All around me as I look south, the flat land of the
Everglades reaches to the horizon, interrupted only occasionally by small stands
of palm trees. None of the distinctive native sawgrass grows here. In fact, the
vista is not at all what visitors to Everglades National Park see. Instead, the
black, peat-like soil is planted in sugar cane as far as I can see.

Behind me, as I turn around, is an expanse of placid blue
water that reflects the sky. It is all water to the northern horizon. This is Lake Okeechobee.

I am standing on the flat top of the mound of sand and gravel, not concrete,
that is the fragile Herbert Hoover Dike, a143-mile long structure that holds in the mammoth lake.
Once-upon-a time, it was considered the brilliant solution to Florida’s sometimes
deadly flooding problems. Today, it’s lack of an outlet to the south deprives the remaining area of natural
Everglades of the water it needs, while its fragility requires the repeated
dumping of billions of gallons of polluted water, with disastrous results, into
the delicate Indian River and Caloosahatchie estuaries to the east and west.

On this bright early Spring day,I’m out on an all-day tour of some of the Army Corps of Engineer’slatest work on the Dike, at the moment
in the town of Moore Haven. With me are clean water activist Becky Bruner; Marty
Baum, the Indian River Keeper; and my husband, Harry, a Sierra Club Long Island
executive committee member and photographer for the day. Our guide is John Campbell who has come from the Corps office in Jacksonville.

As they are in New Orleans and so many other places, the
Corps is responsible for managing the risks of flooding and dam safety. Here,
the Corps has calculated the risk as one-in-two that a very heavy rain, from a hurricane or otherwise,
will cause the dike to burst, if the water level rises to 18’. This calamity
would inundate the small, low-income communities built just below the dike and spread water through much
of South Florida.

Our tour showed contractors under Corps supervision workingon replacing the first of 32 nearly
100-year old culverts that the engineers consider especially vulnerable points
of failure. The new concrete structures are expected to last 100 years. In 2012, after six years of toil, the Corps finished building 21 miles
of a wall to prevent water from seeping through the dike. But the $10
million/mile project stopped 122 miles short of stabilizing the
whole dike.

So here’s the problem: hundreds of millions of tax dollars of
work later, the risk of dike failure is still high, and nothing the Corps is
doing lessens at all the certainty that dirty water will once again be dumped
into the estuaries when rain raises the water level high enough.

What the culvert work does guarantee, however, is that the
sugar cane fields can continue to be drained when it rains hard—sending water back into the lake, which is
already filling up very rapidly from the very same rain. And that is the
very condition that leads to the dumping of Lake water east and west.

Should sugar can fields be allowed to flood and sustain
damage? Should they be allowed to pump water back in when lake water is ruining
some of the most important natural areas in the state of Florida, and in fact,
the whole continent? Who is setting the priorities, and how are they doing
that?

About Me

First as the consumer reporter for Newsday and The New York Times and now as a free-lancer, I write about people who have been ripped off or hurt by the system. One story won a George Polk Award for Public Service.
I see myself as standing in for people who’ve been abused, using carefully researched and written articles to expose the truth and equalize their fight.
I quit The Times when it censored my story predicting that the Long Island Lighting Company would go bankrupt trying to build its Shoreham nuclear plant. Soon after, LILCO avoided bankruptcy thanks only to a bail-out by New York's taxpayers.
I co-founded an ad-free women’s consumer website; edited a women’s cancer magazine, and now write for magazines. I have also taught journalism at Hofstra University.
For the past 3 years, I've worn a different hat as a community organizer starting community gardens in Huntington, NY, as a co-founder of the Long Island Community Agriculture Network. Getting my hands in the earth is an antidote to the craziness of politics and public policy.